Media
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Charges Dropped Against Amy Goodman–No Thanks to Corporate Media
After Goodman reported on the use of pepper spray and attack dogs against Native American demonstrators opposing the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (Democracy Now!, 9/4/16), North Dakota State’s Attorney Ladd Erickson charged her with criminal trespassing. Realizing that he couldn’t make that charge stick, he sought to charge her instead with participation in… Continue reading
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Hiding US Role in Yemen Slaughter So Bombing Can Be Sold as ‘Self-Defense’
US destroyers in the Gulf of Aden launched airstrikes against Houthi rebels, a Shia insurgent group currently withstanding a massive bombing campaign from a Saudi-led coalition in a year-and-half conflict between largely Shia rebels and the Saudi-backed Sunni government in Yemen. The Pentagon insisted that cruise missiles had been fired onto the USS Mason on… Continue reading
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NYT Declares Snowden a Thief–and Journalism a Crime
The problem with all this talk about the “theft” and “stealing” of secrets is that while Snowden, one of the most prominent whistleblowers of the modern era, has indeed been charged by the federal government with theft—along with two violations of the Espionage Act—he’s been convicted of no crime. Continue reading
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Big Papers Want Foreign Companies, Not War Crime Victims, to Sue US
The New York Times, Washington Post and USA Today are saying that exposing American military and intelligence personnel to foreign liability is per se bad—a nativism so casual and matter-of-fact one might hardly notice it until circumstances force them to explicitly state it. No account is taken of the 7 billion non-Americans or their rights.… Continue reading
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A Cop Killed a Black Man–Then Things Got ‘Ugly’
23 September 2016 — FAIR From the New York Times (9/20/16): About 16 police officers in Charlotte, N.C., were injured when a standoff between law enforcement and demonstrators turned ugly overnight after an officer fatally shot a black man on Tuesday afternoon. Funny—some might say that the turn toward ugliness occurred in the afternoon, when… Continue reading
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Brazil Coup: ‘They Let Everybody Know the US Was on the Side of This Coup’
Janine Jackson interviewed Mark Weisbrot about the ouster of Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff for the September 9, 2016, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript. Continue reading
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‘We Are Criminalizing Transparency to Protect Illegitimate Uses of Power’
Janine Jackson: If the expression “I can’t breathe” holds power for you, it’s because of Ramsey Orta. He’s the one who held his cellphone camera steady while New York police officer Daniel Pantaleo choked the life out of Eric Garner in July of 2014. Continue reading
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Media Undermine Democracy by Speculating Wildly About Undermining Democracy
The relentless drumbeat of Trump–as–Russian agent takes hasn’t ceased since the news broke of a likely Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee in June—and it probably won’t stop until Election Day. One sub-genre of this line of thinking however—that Russia will literally hack our election process and throw the US into a dystopian constitutional… Continue reading
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NYT: Corbyn Has Marginalized Labour With His Popular Positions
It’s probably true that Corbyn is more skeptical of the United States and NATO than the average Brit. But it’s hard not to get the impression that certain positions are identified by Erlanger as problematic not because they’re unpopular with Corbyn’s constituents—but because they’re unpopular with the New York Times. Continue reading
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'Invisibilizing the Workers Who Actually Do the Work'
Janine Jackson assembled some of CounterSpin‘s best segments on workers and media for a special September 2, 2016, episode for Labor Day. This is a lightly edited transcript. Continue reading
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This Guardian Piece Touting Bill Gates' Education Investment Brought to You by… Bill Gates
What the piece failed to note—other than the fact that Rhee’s tenure left DC’s schools “worse by almost every conceivable measure” (Truthout, 10/23/13)—is that multi-billionaire Bill Gates is both the major investor of the company administering the Liberian education overhaul and the principal of the Gates Foundation, sponsor of the Guardian’s Global Development vertical, where… Continue reading
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PR Firm Says It Ghost-Wrote Thousands of Op-Eds in Major US Papers
PR Firm Says It Ghost-Wrote Thousands of Op-Eds in Major US Papers. The Wall Street Journal put Bill Ingram’s name on an op-ed–but a PR firm says it actually wrote it. Continue reading
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‘They Are Incentivized to Arrest People Because It Raises Money’
Donna Murch: “Nearly everyone who’s being arrested or incarcerated is incurring criminal justice debt. And in many states you can be stripped of your right to vote until you pay off all of your criminal justice debt. So I talk about that essentially as a modern day poll tax.” Continue reading
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Felicia Kornbluh on the Politics of Welfare
It was 20 years ago this month that Bill Clinton eliminated the federal guarantee of assistance to poor families. Corporate media played a key role in persuading the public that Aid to Families with Dependent Children—representing less than 1-and-a-half percent of federal outlay from 1964 to 1994—was somehow bleeding the country dry. Continue reading
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NYT Touts Honduras as Ad for 'American Power'–Leaving Out Support for Murderous Coup Regime
17 August 2016 — FAIR “How the Most Dangerous Place on Earth Got Safer” was the headline over the lead article in the New York Times‘ “Week in Review” (8/11/16), with the teaser reading, “Programs funded by the United States are helping transform Honduras. Who says American power is dead?” Continue reading
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NYT Touts Honduras as Ad for ‘American Power’–Leaving Out Support for Murderous Coup Regime
17 August 2016 — FAIR “How the Most Dangerous Place on Earth Got Safer” was the headline over the lead article in the New York Times‘ “Week in Review” (8/11/16), with the teaser reading, “Programs funded by the United States are helping transform Honduras. Who says American power is dead?” Continue reading
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Election Meddling: Bad if Done to USA, Bad to Complain About if Done by USA
The Washington Post (8/10/16) published what has to be one of the most naked examples of projection ever displayed by a major American paper. The Post’s editorial board, in another effort to bash Russia, lumped its President Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s increasingly autocratic ruler President Recep Tayyip Erdogan into a generic “strongman” category, and warned… Continue reading
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The Arms Trade: 'You Don’t Get the Full Picture of What a Devastating Trade This Is'
Success is success after all, and for all the tales of a muckraking media, our guest’s experience suggests that when it comes to one of the most stupendously successful US industries, the press corps don’t seem all that eager to look behind the curtain. Continue reading
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How Media Distorted Syrian Ceasefire’s Breakdown
Coverage of the breakdown of the partial ceasefire in Syria illustrated the main way corporate news media distort public understanding of a major foreign policy story. The problem is not that the key events in the story are entirely unreported, but that they were downplayed and quickly forgotten in the media’s embrace of themes with… Continue reading
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NYT Reveals Think Tank It’s Cited for Years to Be Corrupt Arms Booster
A recent New York Times article (8/7/16) detailed, in often scathing terms, what many media critics already knew: that think tanks are frequently not objective, neutral arbiters of information, but corporate- and government-funded agenda-promoters with an academic veneer to give the appearance of impartiality. Continue reading
The New Dark Age 